Retail management is often responsible for sale of goods from a plurality of selling locations. Refined management decision support is useful in making a variety of decisions involving goods. Reports that support management decisions may cover ordering, allocation of ordered goods being delivered by a supplier, distribution of goods to selling locations, open to buy management, markdown management, bottom-up and top-down planning. These reports, available on-line, by e-mail or in hard copy, present forecasted results. The results may also be electronically or otherwise transferred to operational and financial systems including systems that order goods or direct goods from on place to another within a retailer.
Influences on forecasting include quantities of goods to be displayed at selling locations. However, management support systems generally do not have a presentation demand calendar which allows a computer system to automatically factor in the effects of past and future events, when generating management decision support reports. Moreover, integrated systems covering the full range of management decision support are virtually unheard of in retail sales management.
Managing visual presentation of products in selling locations is useful. Retailers invest significantly in building fixtures in selling locations and determining the best visual presentation of products for sale (e.g., how much of each good should be displayed). In many cases, careful thought is given to where in a selling location a product is featured as well as the quantity of the product that will be most appealing visually to customers. Some retailers have visual departments responsible for planning the layouts of their selling locations, determining which products are sold on which fixtures as well as the ideal display quantity of the product.
Operational management required to support visual presentations is very complex and often is ineffective or inefficient. Presentation requirements may be poorly executed for a variety of reasons. First, maintenance of data reflecting the presentation demand requirements is complex given a range of items, locations, and time periods. Second, presentation requirements come in a variety of different forms. Third, the presentation requirements affect a number of decisions up the supply chain at different points in time. Presentation demand requirements are typically not integrated with the operational systems for ordering, allocating, distributing, marking down, managing OTB, promotional or forward buying and planning. Instead, retailers manage presentation quantities through user intervention and changes to orders or distributions or planned values exceed economic order requirements at some aggregate level.
Thus, it is desirable to improve management decision support systems, utilizing a presentation quantity calendar to as a basis for a variety of management decision support reports and operational decisions.